None. We aim for the 500 mark but can accept down to 350 per insurance minimums. If you get another 50 under your belt by next Sept, we'll be hiring for the new season then.
There are two ways to get hired here. 1.Submit resumes in August for the regular season class that starts in Oct. 2.Watch for my posts on JC looking for pilots to fill seats for expansion or for attrition. If it's the latter, it can happen at any point in the year and you usually need to be available in pretty quick order (1 week or less). Most of the guys I hire outside of Oct are determined by how soon they can be available and where they are located since they need to be trained by a current pilot in a current deployment location instead of here at SkyLens HQ in Louisiana. As far a summer ops - there definitely will be some. You never know until around May just how much Summer work there will be but I can almost count on half the fleet. We are going into Canada this summer if I can get the NAFTA certs lined out.
Plus the sheer scale of some of these jobs. I've covered 1200 miles before in 1 solid day of survey flying at the peak of summer with a full days worth of light. (About 11.5 hours)
I remember flying 100' vertical separation on the same flight plan within the project. One 50 high and one 50 low.
Picto had a setup based on RGB oblique cameras, I think one of the setups had an IR channel for nadir photos. Either the drones have to get bigger or the lenses/data recording technology needs to get way smaller, the cost per image/per hour right now is ridiculously cheap (compared to other camera systems/survey technologies capturing similar data).
Depends to be honest. The company I work for doesn't do the standard lines that a lot of the other picto vendors. What works for one may or may not work for the other.
Not to mention the huge amount of juice (battery power) that would be required by the quad motors and the camera system, the line of sight needed for long lines and high altitude work, and trying to keep it all stable in any type of turbulence.
